New 19th edition of Europe by Rail: The Definitive Guide

We are pleased to announce the imminent publication of the 19th edition of Europe by Rail: the Definitive Guide. Copies can already be pre-ordered through some mainstream online sales channels. The publication date is Monday 22 June 2026.

Looking to cut your carbon footprint and make the most of the great rail renaissance? Keen to relax and just enjoy a fine journey? Interrail, perhaps? In a market where there are now many titles on European rail travel, this book stands out from the crowd as the most comprehensive guide on exploring Europe by train. This fully updated and enlarged 19th edition of Europe by Rail: The Definitive Guide has useful tips on journey planning, what tickets to buy and where to stop off along the way.

Europe by Rail has sold over 200,000 copies over 25 years. Literary flair and great storytelling underpin the enduring success of this book, which now includes descriptions of over 47,000 km of itineraries divided into 52 routes. The routes in this book will take you far beyond the Arctic Circle, south to Sicily, from eastern Europe to the Irish hills and from the Black Sea to the Bay of Biscay. With its nicely opinionated style and lots of cameo accounts of travel history, Europe by Rail inspires and informs in equal measure. Perfect for planning short trips or a grand tour and also a delight for armchair travellers.

What’s new in this 19th edition?

With each new edition we thoroughly check every single detail in the book, updating hotel listings and train information, rewriting entire sections where necessary. But we also introduce new material with each edition, often removing routes or parts of routes which have had their day.

For this 19th edition, we absolutely had to include Austria’s new Koralm Railway which opened in December 2025. And we have taken advantage of greatly improved train services in the Baltic States to debut a new route from Warsaw to Helsinki which cuts through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In anticipation of the opening of the new line from Budapest to Belgrade this summer, we have a new route to Serbia. Elsewhere in this new edition, we have improved coverage of parts of Poland and Italy. Our commentary on European night trains has been updated to reflect the pace of change in this market.

Crystal ball gazing

One of the challenges we face as we finalise a new edition for print is anticipating likely changes in patterns of train services. We are sort of banking on Budapest to Belgrade really opening this summer. And we equally hope that trains really will be running across the Swedish / Finnish border at Haparanda within the coming months; until then travellers need to take a short hop on a bus to bridge the gap between the Swedish and Finnish rail networks.

We include in our City Links section some trains which are due to start this summer. One example is European Sleeper’s Paris to Hamburg service which starts in mid-July. We are pretty confident that really will take place. But sometimes we get things wrong. Our City Links listings include the new GoVolta train from Amsterdam to Hamburg which launched on 20 March 2026. Just hours after the book had gone to print we heard the news that GoVolta will axe that route at the end of May.

This new edition has 52 routes; that’s two more than in the 18th edition. We have also upped the page count from 544 to 560 pages. You can see the book spec here and read more about the book in the Words of Welcome section.